Big time newbie question!

Baconstrip · n00b Joined: 03 Aug 2003 Posts: 9 Location: WI

Hello all.. I've decided to try my hand at installing Gentoo. Now its going to take a few tries, I can tell.. hehe. I've ran mandrake for awhile, but decided installing Gentoo would force me to learn a lot more about it rather than have mandrake install and configure everything for me.

The first problem I'm having is that when I boot from the ISO CD... I do an fdisk /dev/hda as the instructions say.

Problem is, its only seeing my 20gig hard drive as a 224MB hard drive and I cannot create the partitions at the size that I want.

Now I had a windows installation on the HD.. and I booted up with the XP CD and deleted the windows partition.

I apologize for the newbie question as I'm sure theres an easy answer.. but hey, gotta learn somehow!

Thanks alot!

-Bacon

screwjack · n00b Joined: 26 Jul 2003 Posts: 16 Location: san diego, ca

have you tried using cfdisk instead to see if the behavior is the same?
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"Without deviation from the norm, 'progress' is not possible." - Frank Zappa

Baconstrip · n00b Joined: 03 Aug 2003 Posts: 9 Location: WI

CFdisk says I have 222.09 MB free

Timm · Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2003 9:28 pm Post subject:

What's the partition size you like to have? If it is larger than 60 GB, it won't work.
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Timm

Baconstrip · n00b Joined: 03 Aug 2003 Posts: 9 Location: WI

Well I'd like to use all 20gigs of my harddrive.. but it says theres only 224 available.

cyrillic · Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2003 9:35 pm Post subject:

It sounds like the partition table may be corrupted. As long as you have nothing you need to keep on this drive, I would suggest zeroing the partition table and making a new one from scratch :

jlowell · Guru Joined: 08 Jan 2003 Posts: 389

I would concur with cyrillic. Clean the thing off and start over. If you don't need anything that's been on the drive, there'll be only benefit in doing so.

Keep us posted.

jlowell

screwjack · n00b Joined: 26 Jul 2003 Posts: 16 Location: san diego, ca

yeah - nuke it from orbit. it's the only way to be sure.

_________________
"Without deviation from the norm, 'progress' is not possible." - Frank Zappa

Timm · Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2003 9:57 pm Post subject:

Baconstrip · n00b Joined: 03 Aug 2003 Posts: 9 Location: WI

Hrm.. still no luck.

It says the following when I do an fdisk:

"You will not be able to write the partition table. Device contains neither a valid DOS parition table, nor Sun, SGI, or OSF disklabel. buildeing a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous content wont be recoverable.

Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of parition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)

And when I open in CFdisk, it says "opened disk read-only, you have no permission to write"

cyrillic · Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2003 10:12 pm Post subject:

So, did it work when you tried to w(rite) the new table from fdisk ?

<edit> Also be sure you are trying to partition the correct drive. Maybe /dev/hda is your cdrom. Check "dmesg | less" to see how the kernel is detecting the drives. </edit>

Baconstrip · n00b Joined: 03 Aug 2003 Posts: 9 Location: WI

Ugh.. your right.. I feel so stupid!

Its recognizing the CD as HDA and the HD as HDE..

Is it alright if the HD is HDE and I install from there? Or should I open up my box and make it so the HD is the Primary Master (Dunno why it isnt.. I think I had problems when I built it trying to get the HD and the CDrom working

)

cyrillic · Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2003 10:28 pm Post subject:

/dev/hde is fine. Just make sure you use this instead of /dev/hda for your /etc/fstab entries as well.

Baconstrip · n00b Joined: 03 Aug 2003 Posts: 9 Location: WI

Thanks for the help, guys

guard0 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Jun 2003 Posts: 96

and grub/lilo, and when you go to format
anywhere you see hdaN in the install docs, just change it to hdeN
(you must have adrive on a raid controller, or an extra ide controller...)

Smokey · n00b Joined: 27 Aug 2003 Posts: 10 Location: USA

Smokey · n00b Joined: 27 Aug 2003 Posts: 10 Location: USA